We all are guilty at some stage of paying lip service with regards to our Personal Information, from throwing away envelopes with our address, details, etc, still on them to discarding the Debit & Credit Cards receipts and a range of other actions which all contain various aspects of sensitive data and allow the very unscrupulous individuals/organisations out there to take advantage and exploit us.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has produced an excellent PDF document that advises on best practices ranging from how to protect YOUR personal information through proactive but simple measures designed to avoid Identity Theft and how to deal with Spam Mail, E-Spam mail & unsolicited sales/other phone calls:

Some tool kit - Not a single roll of maskers or tube of araldite let alone WD4O. 8O

Seriously, I'm sure we can all add a couple of tips ie:

e-mail

1. Set up an additional address and always use that for those sites/transactions where you really have to give them one and suspect they may spam you even if you tick the NO boxes. That address will soon fill up and you can just delete/empty it without even reading it.

2. If you participate in any circulation of round robins (jokes, petitions etc,) beware - There is no way of knowing where your e-mail address will end up & attract future spam. Avoid just forwarding such stuff and tell anyone who sends you any to kindly include you out, they soon get the message (no pun intended).

3. Sometimes you may receive an e-mail from a well-known addressee, recommending/inviting you to some site or other. Be very cagey & check out by phone. I've had a couple, the address looked Kosher but someone out there had managed to configure that spam as being from the correct addressee in every respect!! The perps. probably grabbed his address from somewhere like 2. above and manipulated it for their spam sessions....